The Great Disappearance of John McCain

John McCain's favorite literary works are tragedies.For Whom the Bells Tolls. All Quiet on the Western Front. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His favorite books are studies in meaninglessness, and pain, and failure. He is a man who is moved by sad endings.

Now he has become what he has always loved. Over the last four years, since 2006, McCain has become one of the great American tragedies. He will be studied in history books for the wrong reasons.

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This week, he has clashedbitterly with the military's leadership — including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen — over the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It's just the latest in a long series of about-faces and sellouts.

McCain, in his waning years, has become a traitor to reason. He has erased every good that he's done.

In October of 2006, speaking about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," he said: "The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it."

Now that leadership has come to him, after careful study and thought and internal debate, and has made a loud and unwavering appeal to the Senate to strike the seventeen-year-old compromise. Never mind that it's unconstitutional. It's a hateful, outdated law from a different time.

Most of the kids joining the military today were toddlers when "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was instituted, and there is now concrete, factual, surveyed evidence that they think differently than the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines with whom McCain served in Vietnam.

Really, though, McCain's opposition has less to do with the substance of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and more to do with the blackening of his own heart.

I covered McCain's presidential campaign for two years. I didn't always agree with him, politically, but in the beginning, I admired him greatly. He was principled. He was reasonable. He seemed like the sort of man who didn't rely on ideology or polls to make up his mind for him. Issue by issue, he looked out across the fields and decided what was the best course for his country to take. Early on in my time with him, he worked intensely with Sen. Ted Kennedy — imagine! — on immigration reform. The two men, seeming opposites, expressed their wide-ranging fondness for each other. Each man saw in the other reason for hope, and I did, too.

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And then, over the course of that long and damaging campaign, everything fell apart. McCain let advisers tell him what to think. He made decisions out of anger and desperation. He stopped talking to the press. He became closed and inaccessible. The vibrant, smiling man who once spent entire days in the back of his bus, speaking freely and often correctly about the issues of the day, became a white-haired ghost, huddled behind curtains.

Worst, of course, was his decision — heavily influenced — to name Sarah Palin as his running mate. He probably had no idea what forces he was unleashing, but now, here he is, seventy-four years old, and struggling to find his footing in a political climate that must, in his few remaining honest moments, completely baffle him.

Part of the problem is his people. McCain was once surrounded by a smart, capable, and reasonable collection of men and women. Now he is not. His press secretary, Brooke Buchanan, is a sour and unreliable influence. His relationship with Mark Salter, his former right-hand man, was irreparably tarnished by the campaign. John Weaver left him. He has no angels on his shoulder anymore.

But the bulk of the problem beats inside John McCain's chest. He was at his best — and at his best, he was very, very good, a sometimes beautiful man — when he listened to his heart, when he rose above outside influence, when his principal advisers were the moon and the ocean and the stars.

I wouldn't say I loved John McCain then, but I loved the idea of John McCain: that here, in the midst of so much cynicism and chaos, a man could chart his own particular course through life and politics and be a hero for it.

But now our hero has lost out to cynicism. He's lost out to chaos. The man he used to be has disappeared. He's died on top of a snow-covered mountain; he's fallen into the Tyrrhenian Sea. He has been replaced instead by a tragic figure, with white hair and cracks in his voice and no time left to repair the damage.

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